Radian Pro added to Fleet!

Yes, it themals - A Great Day Flying the Pro!!

We had a really nice break in the weather today, so I took the Radian Pro out to the field and had 3 hours and 15 minutes of quality time with it! A few key tidbits are included below for a quick report.

Temperature: 65ºF-67ºF
Winds: 7-15mph, very choppy, at times just ugly

On the first flight I hooked a decent thermal for about 4 minutes and had to fly out of it twice to avoid losing sight of the Pro! After the 1st battery, clouds came in, thermals moved out, and winds picked up.

For the second flight I remembered I had the Eagle Tree GPS and Data Logger, so I put them to work. Two graphs and the 3D flight path plotted on Google Earth are attached.

I very hastily landed the Pro towards the end of the third battery pack when I heard the sounds of actual warbird engines and saw a formation of 3 World War II planes heading towards the field! I identified the largest in the formation as a B-17! The other two appeared to be trainer or small single engine fighters. What a sweet sound and sight! All I had was a point and shoot camera in the bag, and I managed to get one poor shot off before they headed off towards the northwest.

The one characteristic that really stood out today is the relatively long flight times per battery pack, especially while flying in some fairly stout winds! And note that the Radian Pro most certainly does thermal, very easily controlled with camber and reflex on occasion. Landings are a dream in higher winds with the great flap and crow controls. I spent most of the 38 minutes of the 4th battery shooting landings with flaps and crow, both of which were very handy given the rough and choppy winds, especially below about 50 feet On several occasions the wings got tipped up instantly to nearly 90º at 20 to 30 feet off the deck. While it was a day to be on your toes, the Radian flew with minimal effort. The Radian Pro is a real pleasure to fly!!
Oops - Flying with a "FrankenProp!!"

The Radian was received with a defective motor. With the motor, the Radian Pro would barely hold a 30º climb. A temporary fix to the problem was to replace the stock 9.75 x 7.5 prop with a Graupner 10 x 8.

I guess I was distracted during the prop replacement. The day after making these flights I found that only one of the two folding prop blades had been replaced!!

Oh-no - FRANKENPROP!!

See picture below... Yep, Oops!!

What is very interesting about this is that before each flight I ran the motor up to full throttle before launching the Radian Pro at a lower setting. There was no vibration! My hunch is that the stock prop blade and the Graupner blade were well-balanced for weight. Go figure the odds of that one!